Happy Star Wars Day on a Wreck-Free Sunday

For those who don’t understand today is May 4 (May the Fourth be with you) AKA Star Wars Day. So to all my Jedi friends and readers, happy Star Wars Day!

I’m currently doped to the gills with allergy meds that other people use as sleep aids. And still sneezing in fits that last up to ten minutes at a time. Trees, I love you but my sinuses are not an appropriate place to have sex. My eyes are all gooped up again, and the back of my nose is all itchy. Something that seems to help is the kind of beer I have on hand, drinking it makes the back of the nose itch less which reduces the sneezing and other misery. Unfortunately I don’t have anything for my eyes so I’m wandering around in a blurred world because of the goop in my eyes.

This is the Talladega spring weekend for NASCAR, and the Sprint Cup race is on the tube. So far they have been racing very clean with all 41 drivers still on the lead lap. There were 2 cars that dropped out after a minor wreck and everybody left is on the lead lap. Just as I typed that everybody started making green-flag pit stops which divides the field up pretty thoroughly. They are getting close to half way through the race and still running very clean. I had to take a medication-induced nap but woke up in time to see the next to last wreck when Carl Edwards had a tire go down in the middle of the pack and took out a few more cars, then I saw Denny Hamlin win the race. As I drifted in and out I saw a bunch more wrecks but couldn’t see who wrecked whom because of the goop obscuring my vision.

Also added to my physical woes is getting the fit right on Francis/es. I still have a very sore butt after each and every ride on the bike as I keep adjusting things until I get that extended stem built. I have all the pieces now, I just need to have a whole day where I can cut and weld metal without interruption so I can get the piece ready for oxide treatment to make it black and all the same color.If my measurements are correct I need to make a 10″ extended stem to get the handlebars high enough to keep my knees out of them and let me sit up and put the solid parts of my backside against the seat. I have been riding with just my fingertips against the back of the grips as much as I can which lets me rotate my pelvis back to get the sitz bones against the seat which is much more comfortable than what is against the seat when I have my palms against the grips. The other situation I’m facing with Francis/es is aerodynamics. I think a brick has lower aero drag than Francis/es, and that will only get worse when I get the comfort issues squared away as I will be nearly bolt upright behind the handlebars. So, the brick will be flying broadest face into the airflow when I get the seating problems hammered out.

Now I’m watching the Tudor United Sports Cars race from Laguna Seca, which is fun. I like the natural road courses, but then I like pretty much all kinds of racing except illegal street racing. Natural road courses, street courses, rovals, they’re all different kinds of challenges. And there are different horses for different courses. The opening rounds favored the old DP class from the Grand-Am series, which I felt had been given too much additional brakes and downforce compared to the P2 ALMS series cars. Leaving the older steel brake rotors on the DP cars with the additional downforce, or the new carbon/carbon brakes without the additional downforce would have let them keep the additional HP over the P2 cars. Getting both the new brakes and the downforce made the DP cars too strong compared to the P2 cars that have their rules controlled by a different sanctioning body. The problem is at this point you can’t take the brakes or downforce away because the both required structural changes to the DP cars to implement, so there’s no going back on either one, but the brakes could be taken back easier than the aero changes. The teams would just have to go back to the previous year’s suspension uprights if the tooling still exists. And the race just ended as a P2 car won the race with DP and P2 cars pretty much alternating on the standings list as much as having a few P2 cars with more than a dozen DP cars can “alternate”.

And those are pretty much all the words I have wanting out now, so I think I’ll quit typing.